Now, I say all that because some Libertarians and dogmatic conservatives do show up at this blog. Not sure why, but they do. And such folk are always up for a debate about economics -- what I tend to call a "How I'd run the zoo" discussion. Having learned a long time ago that I never will run the zoo, I usually avoid such dialogues.
But not this day.
This day, Josh Marshall has drawn attention to an important situation: The outsourcing of CIA and defense work to private contractors.
According to the article an investigation revealed that a government civilian employee runs the Agency around $126,500 a year while an outside contractor, doing the same work, runs about $250,000. And the key point is that most of the 'contractors' are actually Agency employees who 'resign' mid-career and then more or less immediately come back as contractors at twice the cost to the government.Aside from that "costly layer of cost" remark, Marshall states the problem very elegantly. Let us add a related point.
Some of that money likely goes to the analysts and agents who have themselves become contractors. But I'd be confident that the lion's share goes to the companies they go to work for, building in an unnecessary and costly layer of cost which has the only net result of fattening some CEO's pocket.
Why are conservatives so fearful of a government health insurance scheme? After all, nobody is talking about eliminating private health insurance.
If I understand the dogma correctly, private enterprise is always always always more efficient than anything the gummint does. So, if we have a gummint-run health care scheme competing on an even playing field with a purely private health care scheme, the private one must soon win out. Any problems created by the gummint will be temporary. The market must conquer Socialism, anywhere and everywhere, in all fields, no exceptions.
And if you allow yourself to think otherwise for even a second, little Billy Mumy will blink you into the cornfield.
Those of you intent on decrying me as a horrible ghastly Marxist, simply because I dared to raise such an issue, should send your insults via snail-mail. Ah...but will you send the letter via the post office or Federal Express? Your choice!
7 comments:
Joe,
The thing that amuses me in a cynical way is that the situation is the inverse in the business world - where employees are laid off or "incentivized" to leave, and then they come back and work for HALF the wages with no benefits!
Seriously though, I used to be in conflict about this. you know, those folks you speak of did spend a lifetime developing skills and contacts so why no benefit from it?
Well, they did do it on the taxpayer's dime, so in my mind, they should not be allowed to come back and soak us for another round - especially if they are still able to draw their nice defined benefit govermnent pension!
Paintin' with a pretty broad brush there, bucko... :-)
Libertarians(/classical liberals) have always been against what they term "State Capitalism" and "Mercantilism". That is what you get when the State favors or directly hires particular industries. Governments like to call it "Capitalism" but it's a different animal.
If those contracting companies were offering the same service directly to the public, they'd A) go out of business immediately, or B) not charge such crazy high prices. And the fact is that the government which hires them has no incentive to demand lower costs (other than the will of the people, which bureaucrats can ignore with impunity), especially since they hope that maybe they can get on that gravy train themselves. As you said.
I believe that most of the Left's protests against Capitalism are actually reactions to the results of State-Capitalism, which is falsely advertised by the Rethuglicans as "Free-Market (hah!) Capitalism".
I used to be pretty much a doctrinaire left-winger before I understood this distinction.
Nobody expects you to run the zoo - but once you peel away the high-sounding rhetoric, all governments are based on economics - specifically, who gets what share of the pie. You can ignore it all you like, but if you don't focus on "Cui bono?", you're reduced to deciding who's right based on which rhetoric appeals most to your personality type / emotions. And we all know what that's worth - Reagan (spit!) talked about "getting goverment off our backs" but grew it by some sick amount, and Clinton "Felt your pain" but then followed the DLC's marching orders on NAFTA and all that other crap.
As America has followed the conservative path, it has steadily and rapidly fallen behind the rest of the world. It's time to bury these hoary old Reagan memes about the evils of government. They put their ideas into action, and we lost New Orleans. Thank you, Republicans!
The last I heard, Medicare was running its healthcare program with 3% administrative costs, while private medical insurance healthcare had 25% administrative costs. There is strong evidence to suggest that if the US went to a single-payer system like every other country in the world, the cost of US healthcare could drop by a third, without the quality of care suffering.
The way I view it, true libertarianism is concerned with preserving the autonomy of the citizen. In order to do this, the law must shield the citizen not only from governmental oppression, but also from oppression of other large, powerful organizations, such as big business. As a small business owner, I am much more concerned with getting screwed over the large business entities I deal with than I am with bureaucratic red tape. And the employer can screw over the workingman much more than the government can. Yes, I realize there is no guarantee that government will be benevolent (whether it is some Cheneyesque trampling of the Bill of Rights or a garden-variety police frame-up). The point then is to be wary of concentrations of power of any sort--whether government or business. Self-labelled libertarians don't seem to understand this at all.
the "corporations" that are taking the place of government services are shells..dummy corporations that the extreme right wing of the CIA created.
Lord only knows how many.
As usual..they are sucking up multiple millions for their hidden agenda..like the S&L's back in hte day.
Clandestine warfare and global takeover is expensive.
Much the same as Jonah Goldberg, in a column today, believes that the entire public educational system should go the way of the Edsel and be replaced by market driven, private school education for all. In his piece, he uses the Washington D.C. public school system as his "example" of how the entire public school system must be overhauled. He uses statistics to show how badly the D.C. system is, but he offers no statistics to prove his point that private schooling is inherently better. He also offers no statistical caveats to show that economic status has a direct impact on the performance of students, which is a proven fact. In general, more well-to-do districts have higher performing students while more economically deprived areas have lower performaing students. And private vs. public makes no difference.
Right wing pundits continue to claim that privatization is better than government sponsorship. But they are unable to offer concrete, statistically-relevant evidence to prove their point.
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